Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Argentina’s Interior Commerce
Secretary Guillermo Moreno resigned after eight years of
controlling prices and imports using strong-arm tactics that
earned him a reputation as a bully.

Moreno will be economic attache at the Argentine Embassy in
Italy starting Dec. 2, presidential spokesman Alfredo
Scoccimarro said late yesterday in a televised broadcast from
the government house. He didn’t say who will replace the most
feared government official who once brought boxing gloves to a
shareholders meeting to force Argentina’s demands.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner
reshuffled her cabinet Nov. 18, appointing Axel Kicillof as
economy minister and Carlos Fabrega as central bank president on
the first day that she resumed duties after a five-week medical
leave. Fernandez also ousted her cabinet chief, replacing Juan
Manuel Abal Medina with Chaco province governor Jorge Capitanich
and appointed a new agriculture minister.

“The government is acknowledging that there is a problem
in the macro-economy and that Moreno’s policies have failed to
fix it,” Eduardo Hecker, a former market regulator who runs
consulting firm DEL, said in a telephone interview from Buenos
Aires. “It also shows that there was a political fight inside
the inner circle that was won by Kicillof, who will became the
most powerful economy minister from both Kirchner
administrations as he has been the only one able to oust
Moreno.”

Argentina’s Merval 25 stock market index lauded Moreno’s
departure with an intraday gain of as much as 4.4 percent.

Like Lassie

Moreno, 58, was appointed in 2005 by Fernandez’s
predecessor and late husband Nestor Kirchner who liked to say
tongue in cheek that Moreno was as gentle as Lassie, the famed
collie of movie and television. The comparison was made in
August 2010 after Moreno brought boxing gloves to a Papel Prensa
SA shareholders meeting to show he would fight the newsprint
company controlled by Grupo Clarin SA. Shares of Argentina’s
largest media group had an intraday gain of as much as 5.6
percent.

Former President Kirchner appointed Moreno in a bid to slow
the country’s accelerating inflation. The government chose to
replace senior officials at the statistics agency, or INDEC, in
2007. In 2010, Moreno fined more than a dozen research companies
500,000 pesos ($86,000) each for reporting inflation was more
than double the government’s official rate.

IMF Censure

Opposition lawmakers began to publish consumer price
estimates by private economists to protect their identities. In
February, the International Monetary Fund censured Argentina for
failing to report accurate inflation data. IMF Managing Director
Christine Lagarde said Nov. 11 that Argentina was making
progress after the censure.

Still, Moreno’s annual income increased by 26 percent to
2.26 million pesos from 1.79 million in the prior year,
according to a filing with the anticorruption body disclosed
yesterday. In his portfolio he owns shares of YPF SA as well as
Argentine government and provincial government bonds.

Moreno recently met with industry groups from electronics
to miners in an attempt to convince companies to bring dollars
into the economy to invest in government bonds, whose proceeds
will go toward energy projects.

Dollar Restrictions

He also led talks with grain exporters asking them to buy
$500 million of government bonds known as BAADE that could be
swapped back into cash at a favorable exchange rate leveraging
his power to authorize corn and wheat export permits.

Moreno was in charge of controlling imports and exports to
ensure the nation maintains a trade surplus and reportedly
called currency trading houses personally to attempt to lower
the black market currency rate. The widening gap between the
official exchange rate of 6.04 pesos per dollar and a black
market rate, known as the blue rate, where Argentines pay as
much as 10 pesos to obtain foreign currency, stem from currency
restrictions imposed since Fernandez’s re-election in 2011.

Newcomers to the cabinet will be sworn in today at the
presidential house. During her absence, Fernandez’s party lost
the mid-term election in the critical Buenos Aires province, the
largest electoral district in Argentina.